Best vbulletin search settings
 

My vbulletin search on my forum is pretty horrendous. Nearly all the members voted on my forum and said it was practically worthless.

I'm wondering if my settings are not optimal. What are the recommended settings? For anyone who has a forum with the search working properly, could you list your primary search settings, or take a screen of them for me? I'd hate to resort to Google search and have google search my forum.

Thanks!

Anyone? For example, if I search for "fop", which is a very common word on the forum, it brings up no results. What is the issue?

Thanks

I don't know the answer to the questions you asked in the first post. I'm under the impression that the search that's built in to vbulletin has limitations and a lot of people have been unhappy with it, but that's about all I know.

To answer your question about 'fop', one of the limitations is that there's a minimum word length which is set to 4 by default (in the adminCP options). The search uses a MySQL feature (full text search) which also has a minimum word length, so you'd have to change it in your MySQL server as well. I'm not sure if that would be a good idea, I think it's probably set to 4 for a good reason. I think if you set it lower it makes the index much larger and therefore makes searching slower.

There's also a list of "stop words" that are common words that can't be searched for (the idea being that they're so common that it's useless to search for them anyway). The default list is here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/...stopwords.html (you can also read that section to understand more about how the search works).

Also, by coincidence I came across this thread earlier today, which might be of interest: https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/show...search+plugins

Hope this helps.